Word: loeb
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Pageant of the Beasts was an in-joke, written for the benefit of a tightly knit little in-group, and virtually meaningless to anyone else. The beasts of the tale were the actors, administrators, and friends of the Loeb Drama Center. The pageant was the Loeb's great Shakespeare Festival, a project which had already alienated or attracted enough people to buy up Beasts' full press...
Whether the characterizations in this little fable were correct or not is debatable. But the idea of portraying Loeb people as animals was unquestionably a stroke of genius. Like animals, they (a) growl, (b) bite, and (c) growl and bite each other more than the common enemy. Maybe this is characteristic of theatre people everywhere, but it was certainly true of the Loeb community in the Spring...
...When the Loeb was first being planned, Chapman wanted it to house professional companies for at least a part of every season; this year, for the first time, two pro troupes will play there. And it will no doubt be a relief for him to hear polished sounds coming from the stage. For if he has given up the professional theatre as a vocation ("I don't have the theatrical temperament," he explains), he has retained the standards it once demanded...
...time he was four, putting on puppet shows with his neighbor and contemporary, George Hamlin. He worked hard on his acting at Taft, went on to act and direct at Princeton. Princeton's situation was very much like that of Harvard before the Loeb opened. "There was no theatre, no drama department, no staff," says Chapman. "Nobody cared a damn." His only encouragement came from two English professor who occasionally stopped in at rehearsals, then made their suggestions at Sunday afternoon teas. He wrote two Triangle shows, playing "Miss Gibbings, a saucy secretary" in one of them. He became president...
Although Chapman has maintained his professional standards, he has turned away from the professional theatre since he came to teach at Harvard in 1951. He teaches not because he can't do, but because he has abdicated from doing. He still acts and directs at the Loeb, but that is not the real thing, and he knows...